Winston Churchill

Parliament
After returning from South Africa, Churchill again stood as a Conservative party candidate in Oldham, this time in the 1900 general election, or Khaki election.

He was duly elected, but rather than attending the opening of Parliament, he embarked on a speaking tour throughout Britain and the United States, by means of which he raised ten thousand pounds for himself. (Members of Parliament were unpaid in those days and Churchill was not rich by the standards of the time.) While in the United States, one of his speeches was introduced by Mark Twain. He dined with Theodore Roosevelt, however, they did not take to each other.

In February 1901, Churchill arrived back in Britain to enter Parliament, and became associated with a group of Tory dissidents led by Lord Hugh Cecil and referred to as the Hughligans, a play on "Hooligans". During his first parliamentary session, Churchill provoked controversy by opposing the government's army estimates, arguing against extravagant military expenditure. By 1903, he was drawing away from Lord Hugh's views. He also opposed the Liberal Unionist leader Joseph Chamberlain, whose party was in coalition with the Conservatives. Chamberlain proposed extensive tariff reforms intended to protect the economic preeminence of Britain behind tariff barriers. This earned Churchill the detestation of his own supporters — indeed, Conservative backbenchers staged a walkout once while he was speaking. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election.

In 1904, Churchill's dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and the appeal of the Liberals had grown so strong that, on returning from the Whitsun recess, he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade. He won the seat of Manchester North West (carefully selected for him) in the 1906 general election.


Churchill as a young manFrom 1903 until 1905 Churchill was also engaged in writing Lord Randolph Churchill, a two-volume biography of his father which came out in 1906 and was received as a masterpiece. However, filial devotion caused him to soften some of his father's less attractive aspects.[citation needed]





Ministerial office
When the Liberals took office, with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister, in December 1905 Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. Serving under the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, Churchill dealt with the adoption of constitutions for the defeated Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and with the issue of 'Chinese slavery' in South African mines. He also became a prominent spokesman on free trade. Churchill soon became the most prominent member of the Government outside the Cabinet, and when Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Herbert Henry Asquith in 1908, it came as little surprise when Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election. Churchill lost his Manchester seat to the Conservative William Joynson-Hicks but was soon elected in another by-election at Dundee constituency. As President of the Board of Trade he pursued radical social reforms in conjunction with David Lloyd George, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In 1910 Churchill was promoted to Home Secretary, where he was to prove somewhat controversial. A famous photograph from the time shows the impetuous Churchill taking personal charge of the January 1911 Sidney Street Siege, peering around a corner to view a gun battle between cornered anarchists and Scots Guards. His role attracted much criticism. The building under siege caught fire. Churchill denied the fire brigade access, forcing the criminals to choose surrender or death. Arthur Balfour asked, "He [Churchill] and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing but what was the Right Honourable gentleman doing?"

1910 also saw Churchill preventing the army being used to deal with a dispute at the Cambrian Colliery mine in Tonypandy. Initially Churchill blocked the use of troops fearing a repeat of the 1887 'bloody Sunday' in Trafalgar Square. Nevertheless troops were deployed to protect the mines and to avoid riots when thirteen strikers were tried for minor offences, an action that broke the tradition of not involving the military in civil affairs and led to lingering dislike for Churchill in Wales.

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he would hold into World War I. He gave impetus to reform efforts, including development of naval aviation, tanks, and the switch in fuel from coal to oil, a massive engineering task, also reliant on securing Mesopotamia's oil rights, bought circa 1907 through the secret service using the Royal Burmah Oil Company as a front company.

The development of the battle tank was financed from naval research funds via the Landships Committee, and, although a decade later development of the battle tank would be seen as a stroke of genius, at the time it was seen as misappropriation of funds. The tank was deployed too early and in too few numbers, much to Churchill's annoyance. He wanted a fleet of tanks used to surprise the Germans under cover of smoke, and to open a large section of the trenches by crushing barbed wire and creating a breakthrough sector.

In 1915 Churchill was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles during World War I. Churchill took much of the blame for the fiasco, and when Prime Minister Asquith formed an all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded Churchill's demotion as the price for entry. For several months Churchill served in the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before resigning from the government feeling his energies were not being used. He rejoined the army, though remaining an MP, and served for several months on the Western Front commanding a battalion. During this period his second in command was a young Archibald Sinclair who would later lead the Liberal Party.


Return to power
In December 1916, Asquith resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Lloyd George. The time was thought not yet right to risk the Conservatives' wrath by bringing Churchill back into government. However, in July 1917 Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions. He was the main architect of the Ten Year Rule, but the major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". He secured from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation — and in the face of the bitter hostility of Labour. In 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded Ukraine. He became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State. Churchill always disliked Éamon de Valera, the Sinn Féin leader.


Career between the wars
In 1920, as Secretary for War and Air, Churchill had responsibility for quelling the rebellion of Kurds and Arabs in British-occupied Iraq, which he achieved by authorising the use of poison gas. At the time he wrote, "I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes" - although Churchill's intention was 'to cause disablement of some kind but not death'. [1] If it occurred, this is the first recorded use of poison gas against a civilian population.

However, while there is evidence that British commanders requested supplies of poison gas, the evidence for its actual use is lacking. Since the British relied primarily on air power to attack the Iraqis, and since air delivery of gas was not perfected until the 1930s, many historians doubt that gas was actually employed.

In October 1922, Churchill underwent an operation to remove his appendix. Upon his return, he learned that the government had fallen and a General Election was looming. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division and Churchill's campaign was weak. Even the local Dundonian newspapers contained vitriolic rhetoric with regards to his political status in the city. At a one meeting he was only able to speak for 40 minutes when he was barracked by a section of the audience. [2] He came only fourth in the poll and lost his seat at Dundee to prohibitionist, Edwin Scrymgeour, quipping later that he left Dundee "without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix".[3]

Churchill stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general election, losing in Leicester, but over the next few months he moved towards the Conservative Party in all but name. His first electoral contest as an Independent candidate, fought under the label of "Independent Anti-Socialist," was narrowly lost in a by-election in a London riding -- his third electoral defeat in less than two years. However, he stood for election yet again several months later in the General Election of 1924, again as an Independent candidate, this time under the label of "Constitutionalist" although with Conservative backing, and was finally elected to represent Epping (a statue in his honour in Woodford Green was erected when Woodford Green was part of the Epping constituency). The following year he formally rejoined the Conservative Party, commenting wryly that "Anyone can rat [change parties], but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."

He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin and oversaw Britain's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926. This decision prompted the economist John Maynard Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, arguing that the return to the gold standard would lead to a world depression. Churchill later regarded this as one of the worst decisions of his life; he was not an economist and that he acted on the advice of the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman.

During the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns be used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, and during the dispute he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country." Furthermore, he controversially claimed that the Fascism of Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world," showing, as it had, "a way to combat subversive forces" — that is, he considered the regime to be a bulwark against the perceived threat of Communist revolution. At one point, Churchill went as far as to call Mussolini the "Roman genius ... the greatest lawgiver among men." [4]

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. In the next two years, Churchill became estranged from the Conservative leadership over the issues of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule, which he bitterly opposed. He denigrated the father of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, as "a half-naked fakir" who "ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back". When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was now at the lowest point in his career, in a period known as "the wilderness years". He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing, including Marlborough: His Life and Times — a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough — and A History of the English Speaking Peoples (which was not published until well after WWII). He became most notable for his outspoken opposition towards the granting of independence to India (see Simon Commission and Government of India Act 1935).

Soon, though, his attention was drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the dangers of Germany's rearmament. For a time he was a lone voice calling on Britain to strengthen itself to counter the belligerence of Germany. [5] Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, leading the wing of the Conservative Party that opposed the Munich Agreement which Chamberlain famously declared to mean "peace in our time". [6] He was also an outspoken supporter of King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis, leading to some speculation that he might be appointed Prime Minister if the King refused to take Baldwin's advice and consequently the government resigned. However, this did not happen, and Churchill found himself politically isolated and bruised for some time after this.

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